All Dressed Up by Lilian Darcy

Charlie
had the dress, but didn’t want to ask. “Well…” she said.
    “Want to stop
in for coffee at my place?”
    “I’d like
that.”
    A weight
seemed to lift from both their shoulders. They hadn’t just imagined
this. They both went a little silly for a few minutes, the same
kind of silly that leads little boys to pelt balls of screwed up
paper at the little girls they secretly think they might marry when
they grow up.
    Lainie admired
his garden and his view of the lake. He asked her, not seriously,
how much this place would go for if the church ever decided to
sell, and she advised him, not seriously either, to put in a deck,
another bathroom and a triple garage. They twinkled and sizzled and
smirked at each other.
    They got as
far as making coffee, sitting outside on the garden bench and
starting to drink it, but then God somehow reared His ugly head and
Lainie heard Mac say to her, “There was this big empty space inside
me and God just came flooding in to fill it even though I didn’t
want Him to.”
    “I’m sorry, I
have to tell you,” she blurted out, “I hate when people talk like
that.”
    After half a
breath of silence, he answered, “I know, it sounds really
trite.”
    “Is that
sarcasm?”
    “No, no, it
does, you’re right, it sounds trite, but I don’t have better words.
I think that’s often why there’s this whole formulaic evangelical
Christian phraseology, because people can’t find good, original
words for it so they at least use familiar ones. It’s a kind of
code. A currency.” He looked out at the lake where there were
sailing boats full of people who hadn’t attended church this
morning.
    “You’re pretty
smart, aren’t you?” She turned her head long enough to smile at
him, frowning at the same time because she strongly suspected that
the best of their relationship was already over. Talk about the
hectic pace of modern life!
    She was pretty
smart, too, as it happened, but she hadn’t had many
opportunities.
    “Yeah, my
father was a nuclear scientist,” Mac said, “and my mother was
ruthless about general knowledge. She was appalling. I grew up
knowing everything about nothing, and nothing about – ”
    He spread his
arms and let Lainie fill in for him, which she correctly did,
letting her tone turn the words into a formula. A code. A currency.
“God. So there was an empty space.”
    “And He filled
it,” Mac said. Obviously he could see her distaste for what he was
saying, but he wasn’t going to back down. She should probably
admire him for that. But in her experience, people who were
comfortable talking about God in that way never did back down. They
didn’t seem to have any kind of a reverse gear at all. “Took a
while. Heroin filled it first. Then service. Drug rehab counselor.
Paramedic. Dad. There you go, life story – life stories, for all
four of my lives – in around twelve words.”
    “Oh, you have
kids?” Might this common ground be enough on which to build?
    “One daughter.
Grown. Twenty-seven. She’s amazing. She’s an anthropologist.” His
expression grew more animated, then fell. “But she lives in Texas,
so I don’t see her as often as I’d like.”
    No, it would
be cheating to call kids common ground. Everyone had kids. “I’m
sorry,” she told him. “I just don’t have it in me to believe in God
in that structured way.”
    “Because He’s
trite?”
    “And don’t try
to turn that around into some kind of test He’s sending me, that I
have to get past the triteness.”
    “Okay.”
    “Oh, you give
in that easily?”
    “Who says I’m
giving in? My strategy is way more complicated than that.”
    Lainie laughed
despite her best intentions. “You don’t have a strategy.”
    He dropped his
voice, the more intimate pitch reeling her body closer like a fish
being reeled in on a line. “I can, um, get one…” He cleared his
throat. “Excuse me… if you want me to have one.” He looked across
at her, his expression